We’ve got the weekend off

NO VERMONT this weekend. Ava, my great-niece from Pennsylvania, is here to compete in a regional softball tournament. We’ll enjoy that.

No Vermont the two weekends to follow, either. Jenna and Jonny will be in Key West with their travel van.

Last weekend? That was work.

This was Friday in Worcester, Mass. Jonny and I had gotten a late start, hit all the slow commuter traffic on our way north.

We pulled into town and turned off the blacktop well after moonrise.

It’s autumn up there now. The leaves have turned. Next time we get there the leaves will be down and it’ll be winter.

Both mornings were right around freezing. As always, I’m toasty enough in my zero-rated sleeping bag. I’ve slept in icy snowbanks in that bag, never a problem, pull the hood up and Zzzzz….

I’m sleeping better than the Phantom. His dreams have been haunted all week by a spectre that tormented him a few years ago in the Llongo Forest. It’s at it again now that the Phantom’s on his way to Rhodia, where he means to defy the Mozz prophecy and free Savarna Devi from prison.

As you probably know from your own experience, when you knock the head off a spectre it will often start talking to you in mocking tones, using your own words against you, so… yeah, rough week ahead for the Phantom.

The view from my camp in the lean-to.

This wasn’t last weekend but that rainy opening day when we were up there to start building walls.

And here we are as of Sunday. Not bad for eight days invested.

First thing Saturday, Jonny’s laying out joists for the stair landing.

I was digging holes for the concrete pour.

I happen to like digging holes in the ground. Tell you what, though: these were two of the most miserable holes I’ve ever dug.

The site engineer says the soil is “bony.” Translation: full of rocks.

Every drop of the digger is jarring. Often, the only thing you come up with is a rock the size of a walnut. The soil falls out around it.

And I had to use Jonny’s digging bar. I don’t like Jonny’s digging bar. I like my digging bar. Larry’s got my digging bar. I had to use Jonny’s digging bar. Enough about the digging bar. (Jonny’s)

With a proper digging bar (mine) I can dig digging holes all the dig-long day.

Real holes, like from two years ago.

This was our back porch foundation. One of four holes. Code says go 42″, I dug 72″.

Everybody’s got to be somewhere doing something, what do you have against digging?

Fortunately, Jonny’s friend Dan turned up Saturday and helped me get through two lousy 48″ x 12″ holes in bony Vermont.

Then, after good fortune, self-inflicted misfortune: once we had the holes dug I set one of the tubes an inch and a half from where it was supposed to be.

Stupid mistake.

I had measured from the outside of the joist on the landing box instead of the inside. That dropped the plumb bob an inch & a half off. I thought I had my mark lined up dead-center with the outside of the post. Except it wasn’t.

So that made more work for Jonny later on: to get the post to fit the box and stand plumb on the standoff he had to rabbet it from two sides instead of one.

He didn’t care but it annoyed me. Digging those holes was too much work to then fail to set the tubes exactly where they were supposed to be.

What counts, I guess, is that the stairs are there and built strong. Overbuilt, in fact. Jonny cut out four stair stringers to support treads that are only 43″ wide. They won’t even creak this winter when there’s a half ton of weight coming up the stairs: a woodstove, a stair-climbing lift and a couple of galoots from the stove place.

We’ll deck over the landing and build railings this winter when it’s, you know, 10 degrees below zero, wind howling.

Just build a bigger campfire! And take more warm-up breaks.

On other matters, we trimmed out the 7′ x 9′ openings for the overhead doors. Jonny’s hired a local company to install them.

Dan and I ripped out 64 linear feet of 12″ plywood and closed up the unfinished soffits. That’s a temporary measure to keep varmints out of the second floor over the winter.

This is lovable Max… big beefhead.

We caught him looking for something to eat in the van. Look at that guilty mug…

Max belongs to Dan and his girlfriend, Kim, an oncology nurse. Their other dog, Brooklyn, was up for the weekend, too. I don’t seem to have a photo of her.

Jenna and Jonny will be on the road to Key West for seven days, will spend five days there, drop their van at the airport and fly back. Whereupon Dan and Kim will arrive by air, have some fun themselves at Mile Zero for x number of days, then drive the van back to Rhode Island. Works out nicely all around!

So Sunday arrives, time to head for home. Here we are backing down the driveway.

Look how cheerful. Except what he was saying was: we’re about to end up in the ditch because you’re taking my picture and I can’t see the mirror on your side, old man.

Here we are off the gravel and back on the blacktop.

That’s Ascutney Mountain, one of the places the kids like to ski. And one of the reasons they bought land where they did.

On the ride home I was craving salt even after I had gotten to the bottom of the beef jerky bag. That thing that says do not eat? I wanted to eat it.

Tony DePaul, October 14, 2022, Cranston, Rhode Island, USA